Making Sense Of U.S. Voting Rules

Tuesday, November 6 is election day. Since nearly half of eligible voters in the U.S. do not vote, the question remains: Who and how many people will actually vote on Tuesday?

The Academy-award winning filmmaker, Errol Morris (who lives in Cambridge), produced a short op-doc for The New York Times that posed that and other questions to a group of young Americans.

The reasons behind voter apathy are many.  And they lead to all kinds of questions about our voting system:

• How do we encourage more people to vote?
• Would mandatory voting increase voter turnout?
• What are the rules behind absentee ballots?
• Why do we vote on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November?
• Why is there early voting in Illinois, Florida and other states, but not in Massachusetts?

We’ll take a look at the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of voting rules in the 21st century.

Guests:

• Jamie Chandler, political scientist at Hunter College
• Alex Keyssar, professor of history and social policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government

More:

• The New York Times: ‘11 Excellent Reasons Not to Vote?’
• Gallup Poll: U.S. Voter Turnout Will Likely Fall Short of 2004, 2008
• MIT: To Keep Or Not To Keep The Electoral College
• The Atlantic: New Voting Laws: Bending the Arc of History Away From Justice